We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.

You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than a natural state.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.